The theory of interventionism argues that government interventions are inherently destabilizing, which in turn helps explain the growth of government. I argue that the theory of interventionism is also useful for explaining the process of economic growth. At first, an intervention reduces living...

The rise of the “New History of Capitalism” as a subfield of historical studies has magnified differences between economists and historians which started to grow during the 1970s. We describe what is and what is not new about the “New History of Capitalism,” and explain how the different...

Does a country's level of inequality affect its ability to win Olympic medals? If it does, is it conditional on institutional factors? We argue that the ability of economically free societies to win medals will not be affected by inequality. In these societies, institutions generate incentives...

It is a little-known fact that Canada adopted its own antitrust laws one year before the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The Anti-Combines Act of 1889 was adopted after a decade in which ‘combines’ (the Canadian equivalent of ‘trusts’) grew more numerous. From their numbers,...

We argue that the system of seigneurial tenure used in the province of Quebec until the mid-nineteenth century -- a system which allowed significant market power in the establishment of plants, factories and mills, combined with restrictions on the mobility of the labor force within each...

Coase's publication of “The Lighthouse in Economics” (1974) sparked a polarizing debate over his claim that government intervention is not necessary for the existence of a private lighthouse market. The purpose of this paper is to reframe this debate by asking the following question: why was...

Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada’s longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the...

Outside of economics (and even within), Julian Simon is mostly remembered for his famous bet on resource prices against biologist Paul Ehrlich. The bet is frequently used to illustrate how some environmental scares are exaggerated. In the rare instances when more details are added, the emphasis...

To what extent are the outcomes of economic regulation intended and desired by its proponents? To address this question, we combine Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture with the Austrian theory of the dynamics of interventionism. We reframe Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture as an...